At 6:59 PM -0400 5/9/04, David Mertz wrote:
>On May 9, 2004, at 5:38 PM, Arthur Keller wrote:
>>http://gnosis.cx/cgi-bin/entropy.cgi>>The alphabet size should default to 8 if people don't have a better one.
>
>Why?
>
>It's easy enough to change, but what makes 8 special? (other than
>the fact it's a power of two, but so is 16). My guess about
>barcodes was that more would have a 16 letter alphabet than an 8
>letter one... but I could easily be wrong on this.

16 is fine too. So is 10 for a decimal system. But there should be
a default, and 8 or 16 or 10 are all reasonable. So I suggested 8,
in part because it works well for yes/no/undecided contests (and I
expect there to be a lot of those).

Also, in any vote encoding scheme, the all zero's encoding should
probably be dropped. Perhaps the all 1's encoding should be dropped
too. It's too easy to make all zero's by mistake.

Best regards,
Arthur

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